stories and illustration

Last night I packed up some paintings for exhibition at The Berwick Watchtower, and today they were delivered to the Gallery. Earlier on in 2012 I took some pictures of earlier stages of these paintings, as I thought it would interest me to compare them.

High Bank August was a painting based just that, a bank along the Lees that was full of flowers. The preliminary painting was thus:

I don’t think it was ever this bright, it was just photographed on a sunny day which bleached it out. The base was very dark, which was distressed with an overcolour, then some rough grasses were painted on top. I wanted to stencil grasses, but this was hopeless as an idea. I also wanted to stencil the lettering, but this also was hopeless (both trials just produced blodges). The finished picture was like this:

I didn’t want to paint flowers at all, but I wanted this feeling of a bank of plants and flowers intertwined, so I painted the names of the actual flowers that were growing on the bank, and their latin names, which I put in for two reasons. One is, I think they are beautiful; and also I wanted to vary the lettering to make it more dense. I painted some butterflies. I started off with more brilliant butterflies but they looked wrong, so there are these delicate brown butterflies, which were more or less the only butterflies I saw last year,which was almost denuded of them until very late in the summer. I remember buddleias covered with butterflies, alas not last year. I wanted High Bank August to have that layered feeling that a bank has, one layer over another. The butterflies were the top layer.

This was a painting that was an evocation of the wheatfields above Lennel village where I liked to walk in the summer.

This painting is called Hare Country. Again this looks darker, but it was photographed on a very dull day (I photograph my paintings outside, with the paintings lying on the ground and me standing over them, trying to avoid to much distortion – I haven’t a clue really, it is all trial and error). If I was designing this picture again I would break up the curves more; however, this year I will have the time to study composition. One gets used to the shape of a page for illustration, plus text, in which the decorative element is important. The physical shape of the book itself provides a kind of structure. Studying composition should be beneficial, even if what is learned is then put into the background. Painting by formula can be dull. Also I have a problem with the tedium of horizon lines, and perspective. I tried to paint a decent sky in this picture but it immediately upset the balance, so I just left it the usual blue.

This painting had at the outset two hares, one in the foreground, and one running (just visible in pencil). The hares totally disappeared, and a strange person with a dog got inserted instead:

I was really unsure about this painting, and was in a bit of a strop about it (the washing-up suffered), but then my husband caught sight of it in the studio (when I wasn’t there) and immediately guessed that it was the painting that I was in a strop about, and said he found the imagery intriguing, so I did some more work on it and put it in the 38 paintings and illustrations that I delivered to the Gallery. Probably not all the paintings I have done will be exhibited, so I wonder whether this one will make it on to the walls. It is called “The Fool in the Field”.

The boy is one of the lads who had horses on the common land in Sunderland, and rode them bareback. Most of the horses were piebald, so changed the horse:

I worked on the horse after I had had it up on the wall, as I thought the black and white was very flat. I cut a sketchy painting by Munnings out of the paper, as I liked the way he had painted the horses, and I did use this a tad to make the horse have more substance.

This girl with a bird is the least worked on painting I submitted. At the end I just painted in the goldfinch and left it. At the beginning she was holding some kind of broken string, but this has almost disappeared in the final painting (some of it dissolved when I put varnish on, but that suited me – I had experimented with putting it in with neocolour, which I knew wouldn’t take varnish – it kind of melts, which effect I didn’t mind as it gave a small pool of blue against the distressed blue of the background:

The darkness of tone is mainly to do with the photography. However I noticed that all my pictures have a fairly sombre tone, even if they are quite richly coloured. I am gong to experiment with painting against a lighter background. Also I am going to tackle painting skies, using glazing medium, which obviously work better when there is light underneath from the white of the canvas. It is surprising that, even when the background colour seems to be completely covered over, a dark base does deepen everything.

I used satin varnish for most of the paintings, although I used glossed for some, and left one or two unvarnished. I was really pleased to getto get hold of the satin varnish in Details in Newcastle, but in the event I quite like the gloss, as against the darkness it makes the painted surface look kind of precious.

However, I have always liked working against a dark background. There used to be some Fabriano Ingres paper that came in books, it had wonderful colours, and I would use gouache with this. I did several covers for books using this method. However, the covers were never really true to the originals as the base colour changed the overlaid colours too much, so a purple or a red would dominate. Sage green was better.

Of course with computers an overlay is more satisfactory in the sense of the background colour not bleeding through. I was given a graphics tablet for Christmas, which I should have fun working on – a whole new world. My illustrations will never be basically computer generated, as I just don’t think this would suit my style at all. But every new medium throws up possibilities, as I am sure this will do – and I should have fun in the meantime.

Like this:

About

I’m Cara, and I live in Coldstream, in the Scottish Borders As well as writing and illustrating books for children I have recently been painting on canvas, in my octagonal studio (aka The Tardis) which inhabits a corner of the vegetable garden. My work for children has been published in several countries, and translated into different languages. My favourite form at the moment is the picture book, but I have also had published poetry, children’s novels, and illustrations for the work of other authors. I go out most days with my camera and create blog entries from the results. Some of the pictures I take will be used as background material for the picture book which I am working on at the moment. My son Matty set up this WordPress blog for me, and it has added a dimension to my life which surprises me. It is also interesting and inspiring to read the blogs of other people from different parts of the world, and to look at their sometimes fascinating pictures.